Aside from geographic availability and certifications, data management is another issue that needs to be tackled when evaluating a company’s data centre strategy. This is less a technical or infrastructural issue than a legal one, but one that will still ultimately determine boardroom decisions on how service providers should strategically locate their data centre facilities. Data management, in this particular context, refers to how managed service providers address data protection (how data is kept) and data sovereignty (where data is stored) for their business customers in light of various laws that restrict how data is collected, processed, used, transferred and stored across national borders, especially when used in electronic communications.

Our objective for this article is to look at the global legal landscape (i.e. data protection and sovereignty laws) in which large corporations and managed service providers have to navigate and then to look at trends in data management based on the experiences of some of the largest players such as Accenture, Atos, IBM, Oracle, Unisys and Wipro. This topic is especially relevant in light of news on privacy breaches and government spying that we have seen of late and which have deeply concerned large business customers worldwide.